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Jacqueline Riding, "Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London" (Profile Books, 2025)
01:03:48
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jacqueline riding about her book titled Hard Working Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin's London, published by profile in 2026. Now, as that title suggests, we're going to be looking at London in the sort of late 19th, early 20th centuries. But a particular bit of London, right, place is really important here and people are too. Charlie Chaplin, yes, is one of the people, but he didn't come from, like, nowhere, in a vacuum, all by himself. Right. There's a whole community that he is part of that was influenced and was influencing a whole bunch of things. So it might seem like he's sort of the only famous person from this bit of London in this time, but. But there's a whole sort of ecosystem that he came from and was part of that. This book really helps kind of use the way in of the one famous person to illuminate what life was like at this point in this place and time. So we have really a whole world to explore. Jacqueline, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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A
Thank you so much for inviting me.
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B
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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A
So I'm the other famous person who lives in Lambeth, other than Charlie, obviously. But I am a historian, art historian, I am a curator. I work for TV and film. And actually my work on TV and film, including Mike Lee's Mr. Turner and Peter Liu, has influenced very heavily how I approach history as characters. A list of characters and narrative led history books. So I do a variety of different things, but all relating to history and art history. And the idea for the book is a very simple one in a way. I live in Lambeth, as I've just said, and I regularly use the famous 59 bus, which travels up Brixton Road and then past the Oval cricket ground and then travels up Kennington Road and then via the Old Vic that travels through Waterloo and then over Waterloo Bridge to North London. And while sitting on this bus, I was just gazing out the window and every now and again the bus would stop. And it felt like every time it did that there was a plaque on the wall that I could see from the bus, from the top deck that said, Charlie Chaplin lived here. And it was just that tiny seed. I thought, wow, I live in Charlie Chaplin's London. And that was the start of it. That was the beginning of the idea for the book.
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B
That's such a fun origin story. Having sat on many London buses myself. I love that kind of that random looking out the window actually led to a whole research project.
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A
Well, I went down the wormhole. The minute it bedded in, the wormhole opened up and I just deep dived.
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B
Well, and we have the results of that. So thank you for doing that deep dive on our collective behalf. And obviously it starts with Charlie Chaplin, as you've mentioned, but there is really key figure in the book that I want to make sure we kind of have right at the beginning. Who's George Tynworth? Sort of a generation or so before Charlie Chaplin, is that right?
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A
Yes. Right. So Tynworth comes from Chaplin, the generation that would be Chaplin's grandparents. But obviously I started with Chaplin himself and then started exploring. And this was all kind of new to me. I knew of Charlie Chaplin. Perhaps a lot of people who hopefully will come to this book will be the same as me, you know, X years ago, where they've heard of this iconic figure, they may not even have seen his films, but they know the silhouette, they know the Little Tramp and they'll recognize it. So he's the hook for me too. This is how I got into it. And so I started exploring him and where he was born and what his life was like for the first 20 years. Also while he was living in Walworth, where he was born, and then increasingly Lambeth, the area of Lambeth. And of course, Chaplin is born in 1889 and eventually leaves London for good, for America, for Hollywood in 1912. But really, in order, as you say, to explore Chaplin and how he became Charlie Chaplin and the Little Tramp, I felt you had to go further back. And I discovered this wonderful unpublished, handwritten autobiography by someone called George Teemworth. He was born in Walworth, exactly the same as Chaplin, within a few streets. So he was actually a neighbour of Chaplin's grandparents. And he, like Chaplin, moves across, becomes a sort of Lambeth man. And he, like Chaplin, is a huge success story. Somebody who's born into deep poverty and against the odds, sort of, sort of claws his way up, discovers through the arts, like Chaplin, a way out, an outlet for his creativity and a way forward to get himself out of poverty and to some sort of security, financial security, as much as one could say that in the late over the 19th century. But security and a career that's beyond the hand to mouth that most of his neighbours, his family and his neighbors experience. So the two of them have very, you know, very parallel lives, but between the two of them, because they both unusually wrote autobiographies. You can span the whole of the Victorian period and the Edwardian period using just these two men's life experiences in Lambeth and Woolworth, in order to explore the broader situation in South London and beyond. But that's why the focus is very much on this tiny square, two miles or whatever it is of South London. Little in London. It's because Chaplin was born there, but so was George Teignworth. And the two of them, really, you can sort of deep dive into the actual what's happening in the streets of this area, using the two of them and their life experiences as the template.
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B
Yeah, that's really cool from a historian's perspective. Right. To kind of have such a clear way in just through two people. Right. And yet this whole world opens up. So let's talk about that world of South London that George Tynworth is born into. You mentioned that he doesn't start off with a lot. So what is the sort of circumstance and environment, the streets, as you said.
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A
That he's growing up in South London. I mean, Walworth. If we just take the place where both Chaplin and George Teignworth were born in 1800, Walworth was really semi rural still. I mean, difficult to believe now, swamped by the residential and sort of industrial and so on buildings of. Of South London since then. But in 1800, Walworth itself had a sort of horticultural industry, was horticulture. That's where the oval cricket ground was actually built on market gardens. So that was the sort of history of the area was very much sort of related to gardening and fruit production and vegetables and so on. And the population of Walworth was around 15,000 people. So quite big, but not that big. But by 1900, that same area, which is less than a square mile, was actually home to 120,000 people. So I think just those figures, just to use a few stats to kick off, really indicate what happened in the area, which is that there was mass migration in the 1840s, the Hungry Forties, because of unemployment in rural areas, rural counties around London, and people were coming into London to find employment. And Woolworth is just one indication of what was happening to the rest of South London, which was less built up than north of the river. The main area of South London that had industry and sort of housing and so on was around Borough, made famous by Charles Dickens, obviously, with the Marshalsea. That area in Southwark and Borough but over the period of George Timworth's lifetime, born 1843, died 1913, there was this explosion of population and therefore building work and then therefore slum areas and so on. So that's the sort of, that's what happens over the span of his life. But if we revert back to the 1840s, of course we should be thinking about Charles Dickens, he publishes in the 1830s, Oliver Twist, for example, which is based in the area of South London around Borough and Southwark and so on. So that's just to keep that in mind that there is this explosion of population and a shift between horticulture and then industry. And I should also mention, because of George Teemworth's later career, is that the river, the south of the river, that edge of the river running around Lambeth and then to Southwark, so between sort of Vauxhall Bridge and then curling round the river to London Bridge is where the main industry occurred. And manufacturing, which included potteries. Lambeth was famous for its potteries and one of those potteries was Dalton's. Dalton's eventually becomes a Midlands company. It moves out of London. I think it's as late as the 1950s, but up to that point it was a London based pottery and that's obviously the business that Teignworth eventually joins in the 1860s.
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B
This is, I think, really interesting to get an insight into what's happening at a very local level, as you said.
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A
Right.
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B
Massive population explosion, transformation as well, of kind of what people are doing, but also helpful to begin to have a sense that this isn't sort of an area that's isolated and cut off from everywhere else. Right. Like there are things happening at the national or even international level that are relevant to these people. Right. We don't want to fall in the trap that some of the officials you talk about in the book do, which is like, well, because you live in South London and you're poor, like you don't know anything about anywhere else, you definitely, a lot of people were not the case.
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A
Yeah, I mean, sorry to interrupt. I mean, as a South Londoner, you know, a lot of people were saying, where is South London? What is South London? What's there? It's like this sort of wasteland. I mean, to an extent, I think it's also a wasteland from, from Social history. There's so many of the histories actually focus, you know, quite rightly on things like the East End, Westminster, you know, areas north of the river, south of the river is quite poorly served. Unless you're talking about those very ancient areas of South London, like, as I say, Borough and Southwark. Other parts of South London is very much sort of forgotten and seen as something that's almost irrelevant. So that's another reason to focus on Lambeth and Southwark in their entirety, as it were, because this is fresh history. This is a new part of London, one of the most famous cities in the world, and there's a deep scene to dig into and get involved in. South London, obviously, like everywhere else, was impacted by the politics of the period that, that I focus on in the book, the kind of late Georgian going into the Victorian age and then into the Edwardian 1832, of course, the Great Reform act and then as a result of the slightly miserable approach to the working class and working class males not getting the vote. It was just an expansion of the vote for the middle classes to a degree that obviously there was levelling up in regard to constituencies across the United Kingdom. But the working class remained separate from the levers of power through the vote. And so in that sense, the 1830s and 40s is crucial because it sees the rise of another working class movement alongside trade unions, which is the Chartist movement. And as it happens, one of the great Chartist meetings, monster mass meetings, occurred on Kennington Common, which was within walking distance of both where George Teignworth was born, but also Charlie Chaplin himself. So snuggled in the middle of this area of Lambeth and Southwark is this famous meeting of the Chartists, who were obviously advocating for the expansion of the vote to all adult males and various other reforms which have been called for since the late 18th, early 19th century. In that sense, I really enjoyed delving into the Chartist movement because obviously I worked on the earlier 19th century reform movement and radical movement through my work on Peterloo, both the Mike Lee film and then the book that I published as well. So I really enjoyed digging back into the idea of working class politics and culture and I was able to do so working on this particular book. Then, of course, you've got the changes, the significant changes to the poor law. In 1834, there's a new poor Law which effectively and dramatically changed the way that relief, poor relief was being given to the poor was being sort of managed and given. It shifted from a concentration on outdoor relief, which is giving money and food to the poor so they could remain within their own homes and insisting on them. The change was insisting on them coming into large buildings and workhouses where they were the recipients of indoor relief, that is through the workhouse. So that was a major change and that had significant impact on the whole country. And I highlight certain workhouses within South London where both George Teignworth's family, as it turns out, he certainly didn't admit to his aunt dying in a workhouse, but, you know, because there was such a sense of shame associated with it. But he had a family who ended up in the workhouse and you only went to the workhouse if you really, really were desperate. And, of course, Charlie Chaplin himself, very famously, both his grandmother, his mother himself and his half brother Sid, all ended up in the workhouse too, both in Southwark and Lambeth. So those shift, those changes to the poor law had an absolute direct impact on. On both George Timworth's family and in a more significant way, and direct way to Charlie Chaplin's. Then, of course, you've got education, so, you know, which is crucial both to the politics and to your ability to get on in life, to be able to read and write on a basic level. Compulsory education for children only came in in 1870. There were provisions for working class education. And I think it's really important to highlight the fact that this is not about victimhood, because some and a lot of working class drove the desire for education. So a lot of it is coming from the working class themselves and then through shifts and changes within local government and then and national government as well. So that's an important shift, George Teignworth. And this is why it's so brilliant being able to use the two of them, George Tymwith and Charlie Chaplin, to span such a, you know, 70 years of change in. In Great Britain by using just, just those two men. George Teignwith almost certainly didn't go to school at all because he was having to work in order to keep his family alive, you know, supplied with food and accommodation and all that kind of thing. So he missed out on an education, but he almost certainly had some form of education through his mother. So his mother, ironically, an older generation, had actually benefited from some sort of education. She clearly then taught her son, who missed out on the formal education, but at least had that home learning from his mother, which was crucial. Then, if we then move to Charlie Chaplin, who obviously is born after the 1870 Education act, he admitted that he could barely read or write. And then when he was handed a script when he was age 12, he could, as I say, could barely read it because his education had been so patchy. A lot of the working class were sort of caught up within the. In the post 1870 act and did receive regular education. But the poorer people, particularly those whose family's children had to add to the economy of the household, of the family, it was very difficult for them to spare the time to be educated. And I think the other thing with Charlie Chaplin is that he moves around such a lot. Even within the area of Kennington Road, he's regularly moving from lodging house to lodging house with his mother and then his father. He's missing out on education because of that, by sheer din, to the fact he's never in one place for long enough, quite frankly. So there's a kind of mix of. You can see the experience spanning over those 70 years. You'd think, think that Chaplin would be caught up within the new sort of thrust for education for the poor working class. But he slightly loses out. And then, with great irony, his biggest stint of education is the 18 or so months that he spends in a pauper school while his mother's in the workhouse, and then he and his brother are sent to the pauper school in Hanwell. So the great irony being that the poor law actually at least provided him with regular formal education. And that's where he says he first wrote his name and was able to. He sort of found his own name, the shape of his name, very attractive, but that's where he first learned to do it. And that's when he was in sort of six or seven until the age of sort of eight or nine. That's when he was in the pauper school. And then finally, because we're going to get onto this, because I think it's a really important aspect of these two lives, is the role of the arts and its connection to industry and income generation and how important certain types of arts were within Lambeth, which both George Teignworth tapped into and obviously Charlie Chaplin did as well.
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B
Yeah. No, the arts are definitely very key for even getting us this information.
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A
Right.
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B
Cause it gets them to a place where then they go, right, autobiographies. And we end up with a way sort of into this. But before we get there, I think there's probably many. Well, I'm sure there's many other elements we could add to the complex picture you're drawing for us. But one that I think probably is worth adding in, especially given how much the sort of middle classes were assuming this was a big deal for the working classes we've been describing is alcohol and the sort of temperance movement going on at this point. So we've mentioned workhouses, we've mentioned education. Can we throw that one in?
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A
Yeah. I mean, again, and I think they are far from unusual. Both George Teemworth and Charlie Chaplin's fathers were addicted to alcohol. And there is regular alcohol abuse which then transfers in both instances, less so with Charles Chaplin, who's Charlie Chaplin's father, certainly with Joshua Timworth, who is George's father, almost certainly sort of forms of domestic abuse and violence. And I mean, he's described by one of George Timworth's early biographers as the jarring note, which I think is such a clever way of describing it. That constant thrum, that sort of almost demonic thrum, that an individual who is the impact that they have on themselves and their family. And Joshua Timworth is such a sort of classic example of that. I mean, I think it would be unfair to suggest that all working class fathers were bullies and alcoholics, because I do, and I hope there is some upbeat moments. You need some uptick amongst all this misery. That there are examples of working class fathers who are gentle, kind, accommodating, hard working and so on. So you have to constantly balance. I think it's right to balance that. This is not doom and gloom, but I think certainly the experiences for both, particularly George Teignworth, but also Charlie Chaplin, was that alcohol was a demon. And certainly George Tymworth didn't touch alcohol, possibly as a result of his father being such a sort of having so succumbed to it and the depression and then the relentless cycle that his father sort of slides into. Tragically, you know, George Timworth says he loves his father despite everything that happens. And he says he was such a grand man when he was sober. But that despair and sort of mishap and failure, sort of. His father would then plunge into regular hanging out at the local pubs and stuff and would just. They wouldn't know where he'd gone for days on end. You know, they would have to go and find him. And once the main breadwinner, despite the fact you've got children all working, doing some very dangerous things just to get some money in. George Timworth actually works for a firework factory with some elements of danger, carrying gunpowder on buses and things like this. But if your main breadwinner has succumbed to alcohol and is not working and not bringing the money in, the impact, it's obvious to say, but the impact is dramatic on the children and the mother in particular, having to hold it all together. The alcoholism of, or the alcohol dependency of Charles Chaplin, Charlie's father, actually, to an extent, he was a victim of the music hall system. He was a light entertainer through the music halls. The performers were very much encouraged to drink in the bars in order to encourage the punters to spend money in the bars. It was seen as a kind of sociable thing. And so I think he was on a hiding to nothing. I feel more sorry for Charles Chaplin because of the nature of the business he was in and alcohol was everywhere and it was very much encouraged. So he survived on alcohol, he survived on a glass of port with some raw eggs cracked into it before he headed off for a night at the halls. Sort of going from music hall to music hall and turn to turn. So there's various reasons for it, but the upshot is that you've got families in a sort of state of tension and often despair, not knowing where food was going to come from and where the next penny was going to arrive in order for the family to survive. So the impact of alcohol. As much as we like to think of these temperance movement people as being sort of busy bodies, middle class busy bodies, there was a genuine problem which at least they were recognised and were attempting to resolve and to. And to change.
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B
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to understand so that we don't get caught up in the, like, assumptions, you know. Oh, it's just busy bodying.
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A
Right.
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B
Like some of it was. But there was a reason for some of it too. Now, obviously, to some extent, kind of what you've mentioned there of getting Charlie Chaplin's father being involved in the arts is kind of, I suppose, one way in, but it doesn't sound like, from what you're describing, there's a lot of ways into the arts for kids like George or Charlie. So, for instance, George, how did he get involved in the arts? How was that something that kids like him could have a way into?
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A
Yeah, I just wanted to briefly go back to the alcoholism and the alcohol abuse, because where the busybody element comes in is, of course, there was alcohol abuse in the middle and upper classes, but no one seemed to bother about that. It was always trained on the working class. And that's where I do take, you know, exception to this sort of focus on the working class by, you know, the middle classes and upper classes, because their abuse occurred behind closed doors. You know, whether it's a country estate or a nice middle class villa. You know, these things went on elsewhere, but they were. They didn't tend to be managed in quite the way. And directly and, you know, directed, you know, in quite the way that the working class. The working class needed help, obviously, in some sort of vision of what lives could be like, but there was a very sort of patronizing and at times, you know, paternalistic and attitude towards them. So that's. So let's not forget alcohol abuse occurs right through society, including the monarchy, of course, as well. So, right, top to bottom, going into the arts, well, I think what's important. And again, focusing on the Lambeth and the Southwark areas, what was important for both of these men and therefore their neighbors and other people who had an interest in art and entertainment was street theatre. I mean, a very simple free entertainment for the working class. And that included pubs. There are examples of Charlie Chaplin with other children who tended to roam the streets a lot during the day, would actually watch people getting drunk in the local pubs. And there's one social worker who actually describes the kids imitating the drunk staggering through the pub, being sort of lifted up by the bomb and tossed out onto the street and then being grabbed by the collar by a policeman and sort of escorted home. And the kids would play it out. They would act it out as a, as a form of entertainment. They would just watch it and then, and then, and then reenact it. And that's, I think, you know, Charlie Chaplin was exactly one of these kids. They would sit on, you know, look on, stand on the streets and watch and observe what was going on around them and the characters and the behavior, misbehavior of adults. So that's one form of entertainment, sort of street entertainment, obviously, music. You get musicians on the streets. And Chaplin talks about this a lot. You've got, you know, major events, annual events like the Camberwell Fair, which had a parade that came from the Elephant and Castle in the north of Walworth, through Walworth Road to Camberwell Road, and then sort of ended up on Campbelwell Green. And that fair has been reactivated recently and is, you know, it's still going on. And that was entertainment. You could wander around the fair and look at all the sort of mad Victorian sort of showmanship and food and all sorts of wonderfully stimulating things, little vignettes, which was very popular. And you see it in. It's written about by Thomas Hardy in Far from the Madding Crowd, that the ride of Dick Turpin from London to York on Black Bess was a regular entertainment in these, in these fairs. And they were very much popular folk heroes. So that's a form of popular folk culture and art. So, yes, you got your fairs and that kind of thing, and then you've got the May Day folk culture around early May, where you had these sort of they're almost like, you know, abbots of misrule. But you have these sort of. The world turned upside down, the topsy turvy world, almost carnivalesque characters that would parade through the streets. And this was a very popular entertainment. And Lambeth and Camberwell and all these other areas of South London all had these folk entertainments. This is a folk culture which existed. So you've got all this sort of street culture then that naturally segues to something like music hall, the singers. You'd start off with a pub that had a room next to it and you'd have people sort of playing the piano and singing along. And then this develops and expands into a pub attached to a hall, an actual hall, where, like a theater where entertainment occurs. That's a big development over the 1830s, 40s and then onwards to the turn of the 20th century. So that's obviously another outlet for working class people, not only as performers, but also the personnel to run them. You know, the theatre hands, the front of house, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's. There's loads of outlets for the working class to work in music hall and theatre and so on. And then another major development in the 1850s was the founding of Lambeth School of Art in the middle of Lambeth. And it was set up in order to allow engineers, mechanics, working class engineers and mechanics, to have some outlet in the fine arts, sculpting, drawing, painting and that kind of thing. And that is very much the area that George Teignworth taps into, because as a wheelwright, his father ran a wheelwright business and it was a sort of very low artisan craft, but it gave George Teignworth the opportunity to sculpt, to carve and sculpt wood. And that's where he started to get a sense of a love of sculpting and sort of also encouraged by his love of watching, you know, the street performers of the Camberwell Fair, where you'd have human sculptures and things like that. You know, he sort of brings those two inspirations together and decides as a young man that he wants to be a sculptor. He wants to be an artist and a sculptor. And when the Camberwell, the. Sorry, the Lambeth School of Art opens, he quite soon after is encouraged because of his carving of wood in his father's wheelwright shop, he's encouraged to go and sort of see whether he might like to sign up and become a student and at the art school. And that's exactly what he does. And like music Hall. Not only were these new art schools, these sort of government art schools, which were springing up in the 1850s onwards, allowing working class people to actually train as artists, both painters, drawing and sculpting, you also had, like, music hall, the personnel that sort of worked within the art school. This was another outlet for the working class as well, the housekeepers, the cleaners, all this sort of thing. So there's a wonderful ecology that springs up, particularly with art schools. You kind of think of them as being quite middle class and they were. But there was an outlet for working class people and one of them was things like being a life model. They were often working class. You could earn good money as a life model and indeed as members of staff of the art school too. So this was an important development. And I think it's an important thing to really emphasise that in Lambeth, you had these wonderful outlets through the arts, both in music hall and. But also in the fine arts. And then eventually, obviously, through the art pottery studio at Dalton's, you've then got the application of the training which is crucial to how these working class people are trained and then how they might earn money through the arts as well. So, yeah, it was a very striking. When I was doing the research, it became increasingly striking how important these two areas of the arts were to the working class.
- [32:55]
B
Yeah, no, that's very important indeed. And I love the kind of many ways in, right. Some of it is like, oh, sign up to be part of it, sort of quote, unquote, officially. And then the other way in is like, oh, well, we need someone to clean the halls. It's like, well, but actually you're still then in it in a way, which is.
- [33:11]
A
And it's a community, you know, the art schools and the music hall is a community. It's somewhere to belong. You're not on the streets looking for something to do, you know, and being entertained elsewhere. I mean, there were street gangs in London, the hooligan gangs. There was the famous 40 Thieves gang of women thieves, you know, who also become part of the culture, the popular culture and the kind of mythology, working class mythology and poor working class mythology. But all these things sit side by side and they feed into each other because George Teemworth and Charlie Chaplin both enjoy high culture, for want of a better phrase, but they adapt that high culture by using their own experience and their own culture from where they came from, and they create something altogether different. And that's the crucial thing, isn't it, Is that mix of the sort of traditional Training with the life of the street where you come from and the area where you come from. And both of them are superb at this. And I would add, you know, this is not necessarily a London thing, but I can throw into the pot another Londoner, William Hogarth, who does a very similar thing. And I think Chaplin and. Yeah, and Timworth as well, are both sort of almost descendants of William Hogarth. That observational art where you're watching characters and scenarios and you're creating compositions in your head through what you're seeing on the streets of London. Obviously he's dealing with the early to mid 18th century, but obviously, you know, people like William Hogarth and certainly Charlie Chaplin, they almost represent that period of history, don't they, through the art that they create? Because they're creating this wonderful mix of traditional, but with the street level observation of character and scenario. And I think I would make a direct line between somebody like William Hogarth and George Timworth and certainly Charlie Chaplin. Yeah.
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B
So speaking of those lines, I mean, one thing that I found really interesting in the way you've put these two lives together is, as you mentioned, Tynworth is sort of in Charlie Chaplin's kind of grandfather's type generation, grandparents generation. And obviously we remember Charlie Chaplin still now. Tynworth, I think, a lot less so. But would that have been true at the time? Would that gap have kind of existed? Or did Charlie Chaplin, for instance, know about George Tynworth? Like, is that's kind of an obvious example of the trope of, you know, local kid made good type thing. Was that something Charlie Chaplin and his generation would have been aware of as like, oh, look at him, we could do that.
- [35:53]
A
Yeah. I mean, I think it might feel odd that Charlie Chaplin as a child roaming the streets around Kennington Road, would have had any sense of Dalton's factory and George Teignworth and what was going on there. But Charlie Chaplin's uncle actually ran the pub that was just round the corner from Dalton's factory pottery. So the Chaplin family were certainly aware of Daltons and therefore aware of the art potter. Because it was a real sense of local pride that this internationally renowned studio pottery was being created in Lambeth by people who were trained at the Lambeth School and then joined Dalton. It was a local affair, it was a local industry and it was hugely successful. And there's an example where this dentist from New York comes over and stays with Charlie Chaplin's grandfather and his uncle and his father, and they give him some Doulton ware as a gift, a parting gift when he goes back to New York, it's such a tiny little inconsequential detail. But when something like that you see, you read something like that, you suddenly see the two worlds that you've been, you know, immersed in suddenly pulled together, crossing over in this rather sort of, you know, rather charming way. And then the other thing is that when Chaplin comes back to London in 1921, when there's the premiere of the Kid, massive success, he's now one of the most famous men on the planet and certainly the wealthiest men on the planet. So this extraordinary rise as he's coming on the train from Southampton, I think, Southampton, coming on the train and entering Lambeth, he actually says, as he's looking out the window, he said, oh, look, there's Dalton's. So he's clearly aware of it. And I think there is, you know, he doesn't necessarily talk about it in his early life as such, but in his autobiography. But he certainly mentions it in various, you know, sorts of travel writing that he does around his return to Europe and Britain after he, you know, takes up residency in America. And I think it is a case, isn't it? You have to see it to be it. And I think if there's a local pride in local people producing this famous pottery, this famous Lambeth ware, then I think it's part of a kind of sense of pride and it suggests an outlet, one outlet for the poverty that you're experiencing. And I also think that it's classless in a way, isn't it? Because talent is talented. And if you're like George Timworth, you know, hadn't no education, but you have a natural ability with craft and with sculpting, then somebody like Henry Dalton, with the encouragement of the amazing John Sparks, who was the teacher, George Timworth's teacher and mentor at the Lambeth School of Art, when somebody recognized it and can see a kind of business opportunity, then Timworth's career just flew after that. And so, yeah, I think you might not be able to make too many direct lines between Charlie Chaplin and George Teignworth, but I think it's that sense of that something, there are other things that you can do. There is opportunity. And Timworth took the route of pottery and sculpting, and Chaplin obviously took the route inspired, obviously, by his parents, who were both music hall performers, took the route of performing the stage and music hall. But, yeah, I think it is that classic thing, isn't it? The role model, the seeing it to being it.
- [39:36]
B
Yeah, no, that definitely Comes through very clearly in that. Now, we've talked about a number of different issues and kind of how they've impacted George and Charlie's lives. One we haven't kind of talked on directly, but I want to make sure we include it is we've mentioned their fathers a number of times and kind of education in some aspects of it. But you also talk in the book about kind of policy debates around motherhood and gender norms. Also being part of this is that an element we need to sort of add to increase the texture and nuance of sort of what life was like in these generations?
- [40:13]
A
Well, I think that the. Well, the women were the key to the family. They were holding the family together. So I suppose it's not surprising that they became the focus and that a burden, to a vast degree, of the way their husbands behaved and how they kept the families together and how their children behaved and whether they went to school or not, to a vast degree was the burden. And the onus was on the mothers to coordinate all this whilst trying to manage a household, keep food on the table, et cetera, et cetera. So there was the pressure on. It seemed to me it really became evident, the pressure on the women to. To maintain a sort of standards within the family as well, that it was the women. The pressure on the women, if the men just earned the money and brought the money in, that's almost like job done for them. They could put their feet up next to the fire of an evening and the woman's work never stopped, it never ended, and they had the children to look after and the husbands and so on. So I think that's. It's a cliche, but it's a cliche for obvious reasons. The women also were responsible for the sort of sense of a concept of respectability within the working class. There was layers of respectability and hierarchies of respectability, and just little things could indicate whether you were poor, poor or just poor or getting by, you know, and food, everything circulated, a lot of it circulated around food, obviously, what you look like, how tidy you were, how darned your clothes were, et cetera, et cetera. That was all responsibility of the woman through the money brought in by the husband. But that concept of respectability, that difference, the balance between respectability and then falling into roughness, into being rough, that visual perception by your neighbors, your family, your neighbours and so on, was very much the responsibility of the women, which is huge pressure. Both George Timworth and Charlie Chaplin both talk about food as being this indicator of respectability. And Sunday lunch was absolutely crucial. And Charlie Chaplin particularly talks about Sunday lunch. He insisted that his mother, despite the fact she didn't have the money, insisted on having home cooked Sunday lunch. Sitting at a table, eating a Sunday lunch was, you know, was really important. You'd starve during the week in order to have your Sunday lunch sitting at a table home cooked. And this is, again, I found that it sort of really chimed with this idea of the Sunday lunch being so important culturally, even in the. You know, even now. But I really, really registered reading it, particularly around Charlie Chaplin's experience. His mother, despite not really having the wherewithal, financially or otherwise, to actually do this, did it because she wanted her child to be proud of her and to feel like he was keeping up with the neighbours. And there's just these poignant little moments which are so inconsequential or seem to be inconsequential, but they're so important. And all the burden and the onus is on the mothers, on the women, to maintain, as I say, this sense of dignity and respectability.
- [43:43]
B
Yeah, that's a really interesting aspect of it that I think quite firmly brings home the everyday nature of this. Right. Like Sunday Roast, as you mentioned, is still so embedded today that that's kind of a way in which we can cross the decades, I think, more easily than some of the other aspects of South London that might seem really different to where we're at now.
- [44:03]
A
Yeah, because it's. Sorry, I don't want to get through this without actually mentioning Charles Booth, because there's so much to talk about. But I think in what was so extraordinary in the poverty survey and the famous maps, with their color coordination of the various levels of poverty, Charles Booth is really a crucial source of extraordinary levels of information. As a kind of snapshot over, what, 10 years that they were doing it, his investigators were going out into the streets of London and reporting on every aspect they could see that could then be brought back to the office and sort of, sort of number crunched and developed into this sort of. This sense of poverty. Levels of poverty and the kind of the granular down to a granular level and food as an extension of what we've just been talking about, the Sunday Lunch is a massive element of what the investigators are actually recording as they wander around the Lambeth Walk markets, the New Cut market, these working class markets in South London, in Lambeth and Southwark, and they wander around and they note down how much half a chicken costs, a cooked chicken, or what's in the barrows. What sort of things are being sold, bought and sold. So you get a real rich sense of what people are eating and how much it costs. And therefore, if somebody cannot afford to cook at home, they haven't got an oven, they couldn't heat it, they're buying street food. If they're doing that, then you realize how little money they've got because you get the prices, for example, from the Charles Booth notebooks, which are just amazing. So I think all that data helps to sort of the anecdotes provided by George Timworth and Charlie Chaplin, who, of course, writing much later in life and sort of retrospectively looking back over their lives and recording it, all those wonderful anecdotes and the sense of what it's like actually being that person in that moment and experiencing it, the levels of poverty. The data is all provided, certainly for Charlie Chaplin's lifetime, his first 20 years in London, is all provided by all the detail and the kind of. The colour is added by this wonderful resource, the Charles Booth notebooks. I would recommend that people, if they've already seen or looked at the published volumes, that they move on to the original manuscripts. The original notebooks are all scanned and online through the lse, the London School of Economics, and it is a superb resource. But even so, Charles Booth only really gives you a snapshot. He doesn't really indicate, or when he does the number crunching, he doesn't really explore the idea of a poverty cycle. It's almost like he gives a snapshot and says, this is how these people will always be, as it were. Whereas Rowntree, for example, introduced the concept in his later work on York City of York, he introduces a concept of cycle that people do move up and down between these strata. They do move around. They have boom and bust, they have good days and bad days, good years, bad years. And they move around in between the colours, the charted colours that Charles Booth uses to indicate the levels of poverty within the London streets. And I think it's important to say that this up and down, this sort of moving between them is a crucial sort of aspect of the working class experience, that some people simply aren't static. They do tend to move. But then there seems to be the almost unreachable extreme poverty. And that's certainly between Charles Booth and then Rowntree. This is what they illuminate.
- [48:21]
B
Yeah, that definitely comes through. Even, just as you mentioned earlier in our conversation, kind of the number of times that Charlie Chaplin is moving around, like within the same area, sometimes even on the same sort of street. That is definitely an element of this too. As we come towards the end of our conversation, is there anything sort of that we've completely not covered yet about the book or anything else you want to sort of throw in to give people a sense of this world of South London?
- [48:45]
A
Yeah, well, going back to Charlie Chaplin to the. Again, this is from the booth Notebooks. There's a lot on music hall. There's whole notebooks dedicated to how much people were earning what was deemed to be a great career in the music halls and what was deemed to be a not so great career. And so I was able to sort of work out what, what sort of income Charlie Chaplin's father might have actually been getting as a third rate performer, as they lovingly called them. But when you could see that as an outlet, it was a tough life working in music hall. It was hard work. You moved from music hall, different venues in the same night, doing different turns for a certain cost, certain fee and, but for certain people. And I'm going to name one of the most famous performers from the late 19th century, Dan Leno. He's highlighted in the notebooks as being someone who could earn £80 a week. That is a lot. When you think that whole families are surviving on 20 shillings a week and that's one guy earning £80. You could see why the appeal of things like music hall, you know, the glittering, glamorous life of the music hall performer. But it was a tough life and a vast majority of the people working in music hall didn't earn those levels of income, didn't earn that much money. And it really was a sort of surviving from night to night to night, working hours and hours and hours on end. And it must have been exhausting. And I think just to support the idea that Charlie Chaplin's father, you know, he clearly worked hard, but he fell victim to the exhaustion and alcoholism and stuff. So there's, you know, there's extraordinary differences in the experiences of people. But it was a tough life. But you could earn huge amounts of money if you just had, you know, the right opportunities and the right person sort of, you know, saw you and loved you. Then as a performer, then you could get on. So it's sort of, yeah, there's this, this constant layers and sort of swinging between success and, and difficulty. You know, it's just important that these people, they are, it's not a static thing. They are shifting. Their experiences are shifting and their experiences are sometimes good, sometimes bad. And it's a sort of extraordinary, extraordinary thing. But yeah, So I just. I think the Charles book notebooks, I think, are just amazing. The one thing that I did knew nothing about, because I'd heard of the Charles Booth notebooks, I have to explain that I normally range around the long 18th century, so this was a major sort of shift for me to sort of delve into the 19th and into the 20th, which was just great fun. And I really did rely on the advice and the expertise of a wonderful group of historians who've just spent their lives working on the working class over the 19th century, whether it's education or politics and so on. And you really are standing on the shoulders of giants. It's a cliche, but it's true. And I enjoyed reading and immersing in this period of history. I thought it was wonderful. But, yeah, I'd never heard of the Robert Browning settlement, which I think is extraordinary because it was in Walworth. It was established in the mid-1890s. It was sort of founded on Christian socialism and became a real hub for. Well, for the start of the Labour movement, for the Labour Party. Keir Hardy spoke there. It was called Robert Browning Settlement because it was actually founded in the chapel where the famous poet Robert Browning was baptized earlier in the century. And it was just this extraordinary social settlement where middle class people and working class people worked together within the settlement and settled in the area and then did what they could to help the locals, to, I suppose, essentially to help themselves. And they tapped into local folk culture, like the May Day celebrations. They sort of tapped into things that were familiar and culturally, you know, were part and parcel of the. Of the local landscape and familiar to the people, and then developed ideas around lecturing and outlets for education and to install a sense of local pride, or to develop the sense of local pride, because it was certainly there and I didn't even know it existed. It's just up the road from where I live. Never knew it existed. And sadly, the settlements archive was still in Walworth in the 2000 and twenties. And then, sadly, the institution had to sell its archive and the Robert Browning collection. The archives, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ended up going to America and then the rest. The remainder of the archive, which really focuses on this social settlement, has gone to Southwark Archives. And again, this is a wonderful resource and I would really encourage people to look into the social settlements because they really are amazing. And there were three very, you know, very important ones in South London. But I think the Robert Browning settlement, because it mixed the middle classes with the working class, men and women together, was really Extraordinary. And I think it deserves a lot more research and a lot more written about it. So, yeah, that was one of the things I thought was amazing. And I just wanted to point out that through this, discovering this, you know, which I'm sure other people have heard of, but I just. I simply hadn't. Discovering the Robert Browning settlement and, you know, poring over their wonderful archive that's currently being catalogued at Southwark Archives, and the wonderful people there came across this lovely lady called Emily Rivet, who was the 1898 May Queen of the Robert Browning settlement. She was an apron machinist living locally. And I've got a photograph of her, a studio photograph from 1898 of Emily dressed as the May Queen. And it was just such a wonderful little vignette, her becoming this sort of chosen to be the May Queen and becoming the center of focus of this little May celebration around the Browning hall, the Browning settlement. But through this, I decided to try and trace her family to see if I could actually find them. And to cut a long story short, I did. I have now been in contact with her granddaughter, who says that her mother was. Her mother had actually written a letter to the Browning settlement. And this letter with this photograph of her mother was in the archive. And I came across it whilst I was sort of delving around the Robert Browning settlement archive. And so it was wonderful to be able to contact her granddaughter, Emily's granddaughter, who said that her mother was just her mother. He was. Emily's daughter was so proud of her Southwark origins, so proud of her being a Londoner, her mother being a Londoner and all that. And it was just wonderful. Cause it brings that history to the present. You realize you don't have to reach far within your own family, your own ancestry and the ancestry of others. If you're dipping into the 19th century, you are just a few generations away from each other. And these people are, you know, your grandparents and your parents and so on. It just everything, what was history suddenly becomes the present, becomes the here and now. And I think. I think it was good. As a historian who normally ranges around history much further back to actually to be working on the 19th and into the 20th century, you really are within the orbit of your own life. And that it is. You are, you know, you're dealing with a cast of characters, but you're also dealing with human beings and lives. And I think that was. I hope that really comes out in the book, because I found it very profound. I sensed it very profoundly whilst working on it. And as I say contacting Emily Rivet's granddaughter and striking up, you know, sort of despite the 10 hour difference or whatever it is between New Zealand, which is where she is, and London. You know, it's been just wonderful because it's, you know, it makes you realize that everything that happens in the past is absolutely impacts on the present.
- [57:48]
B
I mean, that is a lovely, profound realization. I think a good place to end our discussion about the book as well. And it does make me curious whether you're staying in this 19th, 20th century moment, looking to a next project, or going back to where you usually are. Is there anything currently on your desk you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [58:06]
A
Well, I'm a freelancer, so I've got so many plates spinning on so many sticks. So, yes, I think I've really enjoyed ranging around this period. And certain things have really popped out to me, not least the working class, the way they are working in the art schools, for example, because as I'm both a historian and an art historian, so I really, really interested in this idea of the life models and the personnel of art schools and this sort of the working class. And there are very good archives, for example, at the Royal Academy, which engage with this kind of thing. And I think it's wonderful. I haven't really formed up exactly what I'm going to do with it, but I'd like to do something on that. But the book I'm currently writing, which slightly crossed over with Chaplin, is a dual biography on Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, and it's for Yale and it should be out March 2027. So I'm currently working on the manuscript for that and the working title is the Rivals. So it's about their rivalry, both professionally, but also the contrast, comparing and contrast them as men, as characters, as fathers, husbands, lovers, all that kind of thing. So I'm back in the 18th century, but I'm taking my wonderful experience of the 19th and 20th century with me.
- [59:35]
B
Well, for anyone who wants to dive into the 19th and 20th centuries with you, they can of course, read the book we've been discussing titled Hard Working Class Lives and Charlie Chaplin's London, published by profile in 2026. Jacqueline, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [59:49]
A
Thank you, Miranda. It's been a real delight.
- [60:04]
C
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